Git is driving me nuts, how can I create a new remote branch based on an existing non-master branch?

Question

Hi,

I'm sure this is very simple to do, but I have followed a number of tutorials and cannot figure this out.

I currently have two branchs on my remote & local machines:

master
*search_refactor

We want to create a new remote branch called design_refactor and have the code in this new branch to be (initially) a clone of the code in the search_refactor branch.

The purpose behind all of this is that I want to try out some ideas I have on the search_refactor branch, share these with others, but not modify the search_refactor branch.

Our current version of git is 1.6.5

Thanks!

Answer 1

To make a new branch on the remote, you can create it by pushing to the new reference. E.g.

git push origin search_refactor:refs/heads/design_refactor

This pushes that state of the local search_refactor branch as the new remote design_refactor branch.

IIRC you need the refs/heads to bypass a safety check that git needs the branch to already exist or for you to be pushing a matching named local branch.

If you wanted to use the state of the remote search_refactor branch, without any changes that you might have in your local search_refactor branch you could use:

git push origin origin/search_refactor:refs/heads/design_refactor

Once you've done this you can checkout a new local branch based on the remote branch.

git checkout -b design_refactor origin/design_refactor

(For simplicitly I've assumed that your main remote is called origin.)